* Yuri in New York about "The Spine of the Virginias"
Tuesday, February 12, 2013 at 03:41PM I have been reading Michael Abraham’s collection of interviews, “THE SPINE OF THE VIRGINIAS” in tandem with reading COLD MOUNTAIN, by Charles Frazier. They each, in far different manner, render the history, culture , physical geography and toll of human conflict on the native species and immigrant inhabitants of Appalachia. Frazier’s novel draws you into the reality of western North Carolina residents during the late Civil War through the vernacular of his novel’s narrative which frames the profound struggle of the characters as they weather the plot. Abraham pursues an anthropological travelogue that is much like reading an extended series of features in an independent regional newspaper you might read in daily installments for a month as you ride a bike tour through the counties along the Virginia & West Virginia border. In a very different manner, both works land us in a similar point of the same historical narrative and, similar critical observation on the extended reality of western industrial civilization (sic) as revealed in its execution over the past 200 years in the Southern Appalachian region.
Abraham starts by introducing us to the unique history of West Virginia’s Civil War secession from Virginia and travels chronologically and geographically from north to south, much like the long walk of Frazier’s protagonist Ingman from Virginia to Cold Mountain, North Carolina reveals the internalized impact of congressional politics, imperial economics and industrialism on non-elite Americans.
Abraham arrives at his journey’s illustrative pivot almost smack dab in the middle of his text, in what he terms the “Lumbar” area of Greenbrier County, West Virginia, as articulated by BJ Gudmundsson, “Our coal severance tax barely repairs the damage of what the[(coal)] industry leaves behind. The schools are hurting. The roads are full of potholes. The drinking water is poison. We need to have people in government who will admit that we are glad to have all the money that coal has brought us over the years, but we need to chart a new course for the future…..We have outsourced our manufacturing economy to the developing world. I think this is a tremendous mistake, and will come back to bite us. We live in a country that is unable [to reclaim our glory( if)]. We don’t have the spine to take it back.”
Frazier, following the classic plot organization taught in middle and high school English class, delivers his characters’ common wisdom, uncommon and almost lost in our time, just prior to the novel’s Climax:
“Do you remember that song of your father’s about the mole in the ground?
Ruby said that she did, and Ada asked if Ruby thought Stobrod had written the song. Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we’d be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride.”
I can recommend the reading chronologically of Frazier’s novel and Abraham’s travelogue, or if one prefers, reading in tandem, as a worthwhile endeavor while awaiting another Appalachian Spring.